Methods
Using special sources available to all, we craft original stories which are then archived by jurisdiction and topic in a special database, and distributed via legacy and social media. We always link to full source documents. Governments are making more and more documents and data available voluntarily, online, in the U.S. and elsewhere. They know that by doing so they can build trust, broaden public knowledge and participation, and perhaps also avoid the expense of staff hours required to gather information on demand.

Survival
We are supported by private donors, and earned revenues from communications consulting. We maintain total editorial control over what appears at Public Data Ferret, and how it is written. After three years, we are gratefully beginning to reach financial sustainability.

Why Do This?
Our motivation for starting the Public Data Ferret project was that:

traditional news media and particularly coverage of government are shrinking dramatically and need to be supplemented with high-quality lean start-ups; and that…..

there is a growing need for “post-partisan” public affairs reporting, which is based on objective data rather than strong political opinion. Users of the Ferret article database include local taxpayers, issue activists, students, teachers, businesses, government and media.

Drilling Down – Into Online Source Materials
Let’s examine some of the online sources of government documents and data that have been most helpful for Public Data Ferret, and some of the resulting news articles.

Context on Medical Marijuana – Health Research & Public Debate
In a medical journal article, the doctor, who is an expert in addiction and psychiatry from the government-funded University of Washington and the Puget Sound Veterans Administration, reviewed the medical literature and called for great caution in prescribing medical marijuana for chronic pain, something that is currently legal in Washington State. The debate is very current because Washington is now right in the middle of implementing legalized recreational use of marijuana following 2012 voter approval, and new, tighter restrictions have already been proposed on medical marijuana as a result.

Important to “Connect The Dots”
Our method includes “connecting the dots.” It turns out this was not the first warning issued by UW doctors about legally consuming marijuana either for medical or recreational purposes. In our recent story we linked to a related report we did earlier this year, which emphasized another detailed warning from a UW researcher, and also contained links to six other government or university studies on the health hazards of smoking marijuana, something that is now even more socially acceptable following its legalization for recreational use in Washington State.

PubMed User Tips & “Open Science” Values
Our searches at Pub Med usually use the keyword “Seattle,” or “King County” which ensures that abstracts of any new public health articles by researchers from the University of Washington or King County, on any topic, will be found. We also use the search term “Washington State.” Searching by topic is another option, such as marijuana. The results are displayed in reverse-date order so you get the most recent entries first.

The Open Science Imperative
This specialized search engine indexes abstracts and sometimes free full-text versions of scholarly articles in “open access” or “open science” publications. If only an abstract is available, we contact the author by email and explain our project, and ask to be emailed a free, full-text copy. Some comply, some don’t. If we can’t get a free full-text copy, we will not do our own article on the findings.

More on how to do Open Science-based reporting in this tutorial we published.

Data Visualization
Another archive is for data visualizations. Among those we’ve created, some employ Tableau software and others Google Public Data Explorer. Among the particularly interactive ones are those showing:

Effective Government Management, of Budgets and Programs
A variety of government information sources facilitate oversight and accountability reporting. Public Data Ferret’s U.S. Government+Management archive includes numerous stories about difficulties in efficiently overseeing federal spending and programs. One recent example is our article, “CRS: U.S. Improper Payments At Least $688 BIllion Since 2004.” This story was also enriched by additional research we found using a valuable U.S. government disclosure site called paymentaccuracy.gov, which tracks improper payments on an agency-by-agency basis, as mandated by federal law.

NGO Liberates Hidden Government Reports From CRS, Regularly
“CRS” stands for the Congressional Research Service, which is an independent policy analysis arm reporting to the U.S. Congress. Incongruously, Congress has steadfastly refused to let CRS directly make its work available to the public, even though CRS is taxpayer-funded. However an NGO, the Federation of American Scientists, does post online most CRS reports within days of release, thanks to cooperative sources inside the agency.

Washington State Oversight
Our Washington State+Management archive includes stories reported with the aid of many different online sources.

One is the regularly-updated compendium of oversight reports issued by the Washington State Auditor’s Office (SAO). Freshened with new content every Monday morning, the SAO’s site has many dry and unremarkable reports about whether or not proper financial reporting procedures are being followed by local and regional governments in Washington state.

Seattle City Council Committee Meeting Agendas
At the local level, one example of voluntary government transparency which sometimes yields newsworthy stories are the meeting agendas of the legislative committees of the Seattle City Council. They are accessed from a central hub and include embedded links to documents explaining the agenda items for each meeting. Examples of related stories we have done include:

Recommendations for Global Open Government
There is no “One Size Fits All” approach to government transparency. Conditions vary widely between cities and states, and particularly between countries. But aided by the Internet, social media and mobile technologies, there is also growing impetus supporting fair and free elections; broadened human rights; freedom of the press; plus heightened expectations of corruption-free, transparent governance; government performance measurement; and accountability.

With that in mind, NGOs, citizens and governments should work together to advance the following objectives.

Pass meaningful laws mandating detailed public disclosure at government Web sites, including documents and data revealing all prospective, planned and completed government spending and budget decisions, all ethics standards and investigations, political campaign funding, and all substantive aspects of public policy development and implementation.

Ensure laws are approved which require advance public notice of the meetings of all elected bodies, and that the meetings are open for the public and media to attend. Video filming and audio recording of public meetings should be proactively permitted and safeguarded by law, and if resources permit, governments themselves should regularly videotape and post online gavel-to-gavel video of public meetings and hearings.

Establish regular and incisive performance evaluation mechanisms for governments in key areas such as budget and finance, courts, anti-corruption, education, transportation, agriculture, technology, business regulation, public health, and more. Ensure that resulting reports are understandable and honest – and are easily and widely available to the public and the press. Consider whether a formal and broadly inclusive government strategic planning process can help drive the setting and tracking of performance goals.

Continue to share information and work in new ways to establish national and global cultures of concern – and zero tolerance – for intimidation of news reporters, commentators, and news entities. Help support NGOs which facilitate sharing of best practices in data reporting and investigative reporting, and which continue to develop new platforms, tools and partnerships to aid in the global development of an unfettered free press, human rights, and robust government transparency.

Develop “templates for transparency” for national, state, and local governments of different size categories, so they will be able to develop capacity to provide “open data.”

Where “open data” initiatives have been launched, work to make more of the resulting public data downloadable, and directly revealing of progress – or the lack of it – on identified government performance goals.

Do not park “open data” in so-called “open data sites” because they are too often used more symbolically than substantively. Instead, integrate open data across the online government enterprise, by agency, in a uniform and predictable manner centered on end-users who may not have advanced technical skills.

In a new editorial for the journal General Hospital Psychiatry, a University of Washington and Veterans Administration doctor argues the scientific literature shows that prescribing smoked marijuana for chronic pain isn’t smart because it can cause a range of harmful mental and physical effects or heighten risks. A Mayo Clinic doctor offers a counterpoint, arguing medical pot can make sense as part of a careful treatment program. Meanwhile, Washington is looking at tough new restrictions on medical weed, as legal recreational pot comes to market here.

Although medical and now recreational marijuana are legal in Washington that doesn’t mean it’s now smart for doctors to prescribe pot for pain relief, argues a University of Washington physician who heads the addiction psychiatry program there, and the Center of Excellence in Substance Abuse Treatment and Education for the U.S. Veteran’s Administration Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle. In the new editorial for General Hospital Psychiatry, titled “Marijuana Not Ready For Prime Time As An Analgesic,” Dr. Andrew J. Saxon argues that based on a review of the scientific literature, prescribing pot for chronic pain “is currently fraught with a number of concerns.”

A 120-bed retirement home and assisted living facility in Seattle’s Central District named Cannon House is now dealing with its fifth state enforcement action this year for substandard care of paying residents. Operated since 2009 by the major regional health and social services non-profit Sea Mar, Cannon House was fined $9,200 in September by the Washington Department of Social and Health Services for 92 different patient care violations and earlier this year barred from admitting new residents until it straightens things out. Its administrator was ordered by the state to either retake training classes or hire a management mentor to help improve performance. The state also required Cannon House to hire a registered nurse to develop and implement a plan to better monitor resident health and ensure appropriate medication, care and planning are provided.

It can be hard to know if you’re selecting the right assisted living facility for yourself or an aging relative or friend. A facility’s history may include failure to implement prescription drug regimens or individual medical care plans of residents; lax safety, sanitation, or health conditions; or even risk of financial fraud against residents. For Washingtonians though, choices are made easier thanks to a free online database provided by the state. The Assisted Living Facility Locator allows consumers to delve into public records of state enforcement actions for violations of proper care standards, and to see who’s clean as a whistle and who’s not, enforcement-wise. It includes facilities not listed in the helpful federal site Nursing Home Compare, which is limited only to those participating in Medicare and Medicaid.

A new study funded by the National Cancer Institute finds that between the onset of menstruation and first pregnancy the risk of breast cancer for women grows 11 percent for each 10 grams of alcohol consumed per day and 34 percent if average consumption equals 15 grams per day, or about 1.3 drinks. Even for non-drinking women, the longer the gap between start of menstruation and first pregnancy, the greater the breast cancer risk: the study said women who reported no alcohol consumption at all but waited more than 10 years between menstruation onset and first pregnancy, had a 26 percent increased risk of breast cancer. There are a range of other risk factors. These appear to include certain types of oral contraceptives, according to a report from Seattle-area researchers last year.

HIV-infected patients getting primary treatment at University of Washington Harborview Medical Center in Seattle along with counterparts being treated in San Diego and Boston are at significant risk of undermining their care and treatment because of drug use, risky sex, non-adherence to medication regimes and other factors, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health by doctors from UW, Harvard, University of California-San Diego and the University of Alabama.

Voter-approved legalization of marijuana last fall in Washington state via I-502 may well improve regulation, oversight, social justice outcomes and revenue collection around use of the drug, but at the same time will warrant ongoing scrutiny for potential public health problems, particularly among the young, according to a new paper published by a University of Washington drug addiction expert in the journal Frontiers of Psychiatry.

In a new report published in the May-June 2013 edition of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, University of Washington-Seattle doctor David Evans and several co-authors from Oregon describe how an independent community medical practice can consciously adopt new policies to diminish the influence of big pharmaceutical firms on their drug prescribing policies and thus give patients and insurers opportunities to cut related costs. They say theirs appears to be the first report on how small private practices, in particular, can develop a clear process on how to do this.